This magnificent row of breads is a detail of a painting of offerings in the Theban Necropolis Tomb TT3. This painting is strikingly beautiful. Imagine walking into a bakery seeing a display of breads that looks like this. For me, at least, a dream. Bakeries in Paris tend to display breads with the top crust…
Category: Culture of Bread
Ezekiel Bread, Book of Ezekiel, Torah
Ezekiel’s Vision, William Blake, (1803-05) There are many interpretations of “Ezekiel Bread” online, in cookbooks, and even in commercial products. While the most vocal interpretation is that it is a sprouted grain bread, all of the interpretations are for breads presented as being wonderful, good tasting breads. Reading the text taking into account period culture,…
Egyptian Bread from Temple of Edfu
Edfu is a Ptolemaic Temple located in Edfu, Egypt. Edfu lies between Luxor and Aswan. It is most commonly visited by tourists arriving by boat on the Nile. For the bread obsessed, this temple is important for the variety of bread forms depicted in bas relief that are often very different from the styles found…
Scalding Cornmeal: an American Baking Technique well into the 19th Century. Well worth reviving.
It was standard practice to scald cornmeal as the first step in American bread recipes that used cornmeal throughout most of the 19th century. Based on the extensive number of 19th century references to this method I think it is reasonable to impute the system back to the early use of cornmeal in the 17th…
Galen (129 – c. CE 216) The Key to Early Modern Bread Recipes
Galen was the most important medical writer prior to the modern era. All of the Early Modern health manuals and medical texts relied on his work. The shadow of his writings on bread influence us still. When one goes to a bakery and fails to find barley bread, rye bread, and flatbreads one is seeing…
Thomas Cogan: Frumenty is Natural, while Bread is Artificial (1584)
I am working through the Thomas Cogan (1545?-1607) bread and grain sections from his influential work, Haven of Health (1584). Like the author of health manuals today, Cogan declares himself academically qualified to write on medical matters. He had two Oxford degrees, a Master of Arts, and a Bachelor of Physick. He was a working…
Maison Rustique 1619 Markham Edition
I want to start our entry into this astonishingly amazing text with the following paragraph. As you see, it is not the first paragraph of this chapter. It is the most all-encompassing poetically written description of what bread meant in Early Modern European culture that I have come across. Amongst many of us, the link…
The Coarse Cheat, Maison Rustique, 1619, Gervase Markham, ed.
(Notes for my talk on the Markham edition of Maison Rustique March 31, 2022) ” the next to this is course cheate bread, the which is made of the coursest meale as being boulted as cleane from the branne as it can possibly be got, and the boulter which is for this purpose must bee a…
Markham on Manchet, 1616
Gervase Markham is well known in the world of culinary history for the bread recipes he published in his English Housewife, 1614. An insightful summary of his manchet recipe was published by Markham in his 1616 edition of Maison Rustique. “Besides these breads made of these seuerall cornes, you shall vnderstand that generally the breads…
A Taste of Insights from the 1616 Edition of Maison Rustique
This is an exact transliteration of the text for the 1616 edition of Maison Rustique, which was revised and edited by Gervase Markham. As an exact transliteration, some words like wet are written vvet. In this period, if the typesetter ran out of the w letters, they could improvise by using vv instead. All published…